skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes I do consider fixed prices for books a good thing.

If it were not for this "prix unique" law, there would be as many local bookstores as there are local disc stores out of Paris: 0, and apart from amazon and fnac, there would be no big bookstores. But we have quite a number of them (chapitre, le furet, cultura, decitre...). Don't forget that Amazon Europe is located in Luxembourg where the tax on books is one of the lowest in Europe (3%).

So I am happy to be able to buy my ebooks from independent french bookstores for the same price as it would be from amazon.
I know, but I think the way you were talking about it brought "what it means to be a programmer" into line with working as a programmer generally. He's talking about how a pessimistic feeling about being a programmer arises. But I think you're essentially saying: just avoid that problem and it'll work out. That train has left the station.

You say "no need to be a pessimist" but I don't think that's what's going on at all. If you encountered a bug in a program, you wouldn't say "oh, program, don't be so pessimistic, just keep running and you'll be fine!" He's diagnosing the problem, not declaring that it's insurmountable on a case-by-case basis. I don't think that's dangerous, I think it's appropriate. When you see the feedback loop more clearly, you can deal with it. Ok, that might mean pushing through to a better place (if one believes that will work for everyone, as it has worked for you) or it might mean finding a different career.

I just don't think your description of waking up one day and feeling that things have gotten easier squares with what a lot of us experience. Things do not always get much easier just because you keep going, or because you try one thing after another. Sometimes the work gets much more rewarding, for some people, but you can also burn out before you reach 10,000 hours, and it's not reasonable to say that people should simply figure out how not to burn out. To pin that all on a pessimistic attitude is trivializing a non-trivial problem.
In no particular order:

- new, shiny, toy (boys will be boys)
- sufficiently different (allows for think different moments)
- sufficiently subtle (does promote deep think moments)
- bipolars are sexy (Go is seriously bipolar.)
- pedigree (Go is something of a pedagogue)
Is it too much to hope for that the USPTO would acknowledge the need for patent policy reform in its amicus curiae?

Surely there are people there that recognize current patent policy is antiquated (to put it mildly).
It is very easy to write bad crypto with PyCrypto (it is an interface on pretty much the same level as OpenSSL). As a Python developer, you have access to Keyczar, which is what you should use instead of PyCrypto. The number of questions you'd have to address about your PyCrypto cryptosystem to make that point an asset instead of a liability (to savvy readers) is too large for the page you're trying to write.

You've exposed SSH to the Internet? Your SSH endpoints have routable IP addresses? How many of them do you have? If you've deployed this on EC2, you'd be better off moving all your admin to a VPN connection, so that any server you'd SSH into has a 10-net address.
Reminds me of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquity_(Firefox)

Tying this down to the specific domain of web development will probably help its longevity though.

I'm very excited about the add-your-own feature and hope it's similar.
How to Increase Profits with a Pay Per Head Service
Readable is a bit of a stretch when the js is thousands of lines of files concatenation together with variable renaming. Google Closure compiler also does function inlining among other optimizations; it's not like you can do view source in Gmail and expect to get anywhere without a lot of reverse engineering effort.
Among all the non-programmers I've talked to about work, I've never found one who doesn't have to deal with some sort of constant, repetitive negative feedback. Teachers have to deal with some kids that simply won't stop acting out, and who continually perform poorly on assignments (not to mention parents happy to tell them everything that the teacher is doing wrong). The salespeople have countless deals they fail to close. The manager has to make painful decisions about other peoples' livelihoods, and absorb the criticisms coming down from higher up the chain. The artist has to deal with everyone being a critic, and doesn't have the luxury of dealing with things that either work or don't work, it's all subjective. The doctor can't cure everyone. The lawyer can't get justice for everybody. The data-entry clerk peon has to ignore that they're completely replaceable and that they'll probably be replaced by a computer sooner or later. Anyone building anything (not just software) has to deal with the reality that 95% of the time, it's not done yet, and you still have more work to do and things to fix.

That's not to say that some people aren't going to be happier in certain fields than others, or that some subsets of the field fit some mindsets better than others, but software is pretty good work. The article acknowledges this right up front, and then ignores that to dwell on the negatives. It blew my mind a little to see such a negative perspective. If I fix a simple bug in my code, it doesn't bother me much, because I know I sometimes make mistakes. If I find and fix a really interesting subtle thing, then it means I learned something new, and that the product is now in better shape than it was yesterday. If there's a usability issue, it's an opportunity to figure out a new way to do it. And all the while I have the constant positive feedback of knowing that this thing that I built is doing something, I can directly watch it do that thing, and that it's being used by people to get stuff done.

Unless you build everything exactly right the first time, and never have to deal with external changes that mean the software needs to change, you're never going to be free of negative feedback. So you should start looking at why you're letting the negative parts drive your attitude.

EDIT: My own personal idiosyncrasy is that I get very suspicious, maybe even paranoid, about a complex task if everything seems to work right the first time and I don't have a few cycles of negative feedback. I know it's complex, and so I don't expect perfection out of the gate, so a few runs through the "fix one thing, find another issue" washer are oddly reassuring to me. Even though rationally I know that fixing things I knew to test for doesn't mean it's any less likely that there are errors in the things I haven't thought to test.
Firefox 16: Take screenshots using the new Developer Toolbar
In order to be useful, hand gestures are not something that should be tied to a specific input device as they have been up until now. The goal should be for a vocabulary of gestures to work consistently across all devices. e.g. You should be able to adjust volume by turning an imaginary knob whether you're working with a tablet and using this wrist-sensor, sitting at a desk with a web-cam, or sitting on your couch in front of a Kinect sensor.

Microsoft is positioning itself to be the author of leading OS's running in all of these environments, so they should build in gesture support that uses any form of gesture capture available and possibly even pools all devices available in a given instant to improve fidelity. e.g. These wrist devices are unlikely to be perfect, nor are Kinect devices, but both of them working together should be able to improve overall fidelity.

If Microsoft does this well enough, it may one day seem strange to think of a computer that cannot "see" you. Perhaps that's a bit creepy...
That was my first concern as well. This is a great feature, as long as we can customize the button, otherwise I'm not really excited to share this with customers. As much as I love Stripe, my customers want a way to "Pay with credit card" not "Pay with Stripe".
The more I Stripe the more I die inside looking at my Paypal websites.... Please bring it to the EU(at least the UK)
Axon Framework: CQRS Framework for Java
Don't know about parent poster, but I think:

a) It's better to have it baked into the browser in general, if it's something you use. Worse if it's not, though.

b) Screenshots with selectors are pretty awesome, and I don't think most extensions would provide that
I use them as a replacement for bookmarks. My browser chrome is ridiculously small, just tabs, so no bookmark bar, and if I did bookmark everything into the bookmark system (which is hidden under several mouse clicks), I'd have to keep it organised, whereas tabs are at least in chronological order (approximately), which is more useful than alphabetic order when I'm looking for something without knowing what it is called.
Paul Thomas Anderson, directed, wrote, and produced/edited

The author's point is that such arrangements are quite unusual. There are several top-line directors like that - PT Anderson; Christopher Nolan; Quentin Tarantino; Josh Wheedon; Darren Aronofsky; Clint Eastwood; Robert Rodriguez. But they're top-line directors because they're exceptionally talented, and can afford to make fewer films and exercise obsessive control over them, and the investment almost always pays off. I'd say there are 20-25 people working Hollywood who are that deeply involved in the creation of their films. They are a small proportion of the total number of working and would-be directors.
If I sound argumentative and fired up, it's because I feel like Mozilla has been casting stones on this issue for years. Imagine how you would feel if Google executives were publicly criticizing Mozilla efforts like Persona, arguing that they would never support them and no one else will either, basing their criticisms on issues that you are actively fixing.

(For what it's worth, Persona looks promising to me personally, and I also like Rust very much, a lot more than Go. I say this to demonstrate that I'm not just a Google partisan and that I admire a lot of what comes from Mozilla).

I am much happier to discuss this dispassionately on a technical basis. I'm much happier if I don't have to argue against what to me are very unfair accusations, like being as proprietary as Silverlight.

> Here's a final clue: all browser vendors, definitely including Chrome, make the rule (not an argument) "no one gets to the machine except through our VM(s) and GC(s)"

I don't understand the argument you are making, (P)NaCl are specifically designed to allow execution of untrusted code without making it run on top of a VM or GC. And (P)NaCl executables are OS-independent. I don't understand what you're getting at here.
Back When the Cloud Was Dumb
Did you read his updates?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/progressivetech1/detect-...

He is out there.
> but none of the negative things will happen to us because we’re too awesome.

I just wanted to note that the above is the definition of hubris, and exactly what the people doing EDD (Ego-Driven Development) are thinking: http://deliberate-software.com/ego-driven-development.

Having said that though, I do hope that your team is indeed that awesome and I wish you success. I would just caution you to think very critically when you become tempted by the "we're too awesome" line of thought.
I think a more accurate way to say this is, for people that it makes more sense to buy a budget laptop/desktop ($300-500), Apple does not have an offering.
Indeed "ebook readers" is written deep in the page. I thought e-reader was the most used term, apparently I was wrong. but the one that really surprised me was "ebook reading device". What sort of periphrase is this?
After being a programmer for 20 years, I never thought of it that way. I think it is one of the better jobs out there, and I've always considered myself fortunate to be able to make a living that way. I will say, however, that spending the last 5 years working as at technology director at a school has been more rewarding, but it is not so much the kind of work I'm doing, but that I really value this school and the work they do. I feel privileged to be a part of it. In fact, the most difficult thing I dealt with in my programming career was not the work of programming, but working for companies where I did not always believe in the product.
There seems to be a bug in Chrome when the javascript validates my MM input. Notice that MM is impossible (66) yet it highlights the YY box (which is valid): http://i.imgur.com/iHYFe.jpg
Does Stripe ask for any more information than that available on the card?

Normally I'm asked for at least a Post Code, which I assume is part of reducing fraud, through making it a bit more difficult to use a stolen card.
Ubuntu Linux: Donationware?
Quick follow up... They might have changed the system since I took a class last, I don't know. So I decided to sign up for a class and BAM!

There it is, really obvious too.

https://twitter.com/blaines/status/255762571704020992/photo/...
Thanks for your response..I deleted my original response because after reading the guidelines I noticed one that says "don't complain about things not being appropriate for HN, flag them instead". Which makes sense. I guess you just have to take the lumps with your oatmeal and not complain about it.
Unfortunately, many developers don't get a lot of opportunities to see their product in action. If you work on some public-facing service like Google or Facebook, you'll get to see your code being used. But if you work on a product that big companies deploy on their internal networks to improve their productivity, you won't see much of it.
Google in bid to avoid EU antitrust war
Ha. I'm a sysadmin.

Do you know when your sysadmins are doing the job right? When you don't notice.

The only possible way for a sysadmin to get noticed is to screw up.
EDIT: to avoid any FUD, there's no problem with the URL; as the replies say, the path of the target URL is encrypted under SSL.

---

ORIGINAL: I have a question about the security of the button, though I may be wrong. The outgoing request is a GET with the credit card info in plain-text as a query parameter. With it went all of the cookies in the origin's domain.

GET https://api.stripe.com/v1/tokens?key=W1xyC0XilnJTkz52noGj1Hh...

The SSL keeps the cookies safe from loggers, but not from stripe. The URL, however, is not protected from anybody, right?
Another great thing about bitbucket is that the basic code which handles the mercurial integration has been published as a Django application (on bitbucket of course). This has allowed us to create our own specialised code hosting platform. ( http://mbed.org/code/ )
Tabs in separate processes is the only thing I care about when considering switching back to Firefox. As long as a single poorly coded site or plugin can freeze or kill the entire browser, I simply cannot use Firefox.
What is the practical application of this? As opposed to a generic link shortener? I mean how is a 32-bit hash better than just using bit.ly/Nx7ax1?
Interesting if bitly guys had a look at beanstalkd before implementing nsqd.
Windows user here.

On Linux the humble bundle was almost always the first chance to get a hold of the games, while on Windows they'd often all already been out for 6-12 month. I'd almost always already bought and played at least 3 of games in the bundle for $10-20 each and often the games that I hadn't bought where games that I wasn't interested in. So for me 'buying' the Humble bundle was a straight up donation to support a concept I liked, rather than a way to get games. I suspect many windows users where in the same position.
I'm pretty sure a cookie wouldn't be the safest idea in the world to hold these kind of information
Musing on Semantics (or Why A Semantic Web Will Become Necessary)
I love it. Well executed. My only comment is to make the text on the button customizable.
In my opinion the button resembles a regular bootstrap button. I think Stripe ought to give this button a little creative touch to make it instantly recognizable; you know, building the brand recognition thing. When I see the Paypal button i instantly know what I'm clicking on.
If a disk fails, it still needs to be replaced. RAID etc lets you avoid data loss until you replace the drive.
The Stripe brand is not equivalent to paypal yet
Russian Web proxy with backdoors, Distributing malware
Made the switch today because of this, and a few other features and improvements since I last used firefox.
And according to [0], Chrome apparently has some (most?) of these features locked behind a big flag (seems to be "Enable Experimental JavaScript" in about:flags, no idea what's implemented though)

edit: http://kangax.github.com/es5-compat-table/es6/ considering the sea of red, it's rather clear that both Firefox and Chrome only implement some ES6 features (note: this crashes Chrome 22 after enabling "experimental javascript", which may explain the big flag, and the latest Firefox 16 improves quite a bit on the listed Firefox 13: adds const, default params, rest params, proxies and all the new Number functions)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4633069
No. They are not designed to be mixed.
A better JPA: 15 times faster
Definition of a Co-founder in 6 pictures
CodeIgniter's bug that turned out to be a feature
Nothing against any site in particular, but these are things which I hold against most websites:

1. Page load times

2. Ads, interstitials, popups, screen-coverers

3. Those annoying bars at the top or bottom of a page that move with the page. Or the ones that pop out when you've read 2/3 of an article.

4. Auto-playing video and ads with sound.

5. Javascript exploits are uncommon (tinfoil hat)

I want a flat web, and disabling Javascript gives it to me. Thankfully, Chrome lets you whitelist sites.
surio, your account was hellbanned 5 days ago.
An article that cover it:
http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/10/9/batoo-jpa-the-new-...
I think this is a great idea and I love how they decided to include a users' feedback on what matters for them.
Can I ask what color theme you're using there?
I'm a developer using Linux at work but it's sure not a high-paying job.

I'm usually around average Linux when I buy a Humble Bundle and I'm making under $50k a year.
First you say the religious aspect of communities is coincidental then you say that religion forms chasm-surrounded communities.

Which is it?
FWIW, App Engine went through quite long periods (as in, well over a few months at a stretch) of serious scalability problems: the latency was enormous, and even by Google's own reporting standards (they had websites you could use to monitor the environment) everything was coming up red; it got so bad once that they stopped charging for the service for a while (not a day, but a couple months) until they could get it remotely operational again.

I really do not get the impression that the people on the App Engine product mailing lists actually feel like they are able to spend less time on operations, and there are numerous alternatives that let you use more standardized stacks to get similar benefits, especially if you are serving less than a few tens of millions of users (which, honestly, it is not clear App Engine would handle in practice anyway, even though in theory it would work great).
The option "send to Kindle" appears on the page https://www.humblebundle.com/downloads?key=YOURUNIQUEKEY after you purchase the bundle.
wow. At least they gave you the option to opt-out haha :)
HTTPS URLs are encrypted along with the rest of the request.
That is interesting, the form is a POST, must be Javascript doing the GET in its place. I wonder what the technical advantage of GET is in this case.
The path part of the URL is encrypted along with the rest of the request. Only the DNS lookup (i.e., the hostname) is in the clear.
I see an empty space on IE 10, could anybody post a screenshot please?
SQLAlchemy is an amazing library, and I wish I didn't need the Django Admin (our project is still depending on it for a bunch of... well, admin work) so I could just use SQLAlchemy everywhere.
The path and parameters of the URL are part of the HTTP conversation that is encrypted.

In a simple sense, only the host name and IP address are not protected.
Backblaze is hosted out of a SF datacenter, where power is much more expensive than other US locations; I assume someone has done the math whether its cheaper to replace failed drives from frequent spinups/downs vs burning the power to keep them spinning.
Try donating $0.01 and see what happens ;)
It's pretty much a showstopper for me.

I think they need to start with something like 'Pay with Credit Card <br/><small>powered by Stripe</small>', and as their brand grows switch the emphasis to their brand and away from the word Credit Card.
"Ransomware": Pay Up or the Hard Drive Gets It
I can think of many: gardening clubs, model railroad clubs, stamp collectors, bicycle racing clubs.

I go to many music jams that consist of religious and non-religious musicians to about equal proportions.
Hear, hear. I actually wrote just that at first but dropped yet by mistake when I reworded my post. Not yet, but here's hoping.
Are you sure you're looking at the redesign? It looks less like GitHub now. There are still similarities, but Bitbucket is thankfully starting to take on its own style.
I use Stripe on our website for payments and it's beautiful. I agree that Stripe is still not that well known outside tech/geek circles. But it will be very useful for one-time payment type of websites/blogs and I'm sure it will give lot of brand lift to Stripe in non-tech users.

To Stripe Folks: It would be great to have "Powered by Stripe" badge so that developers can show that payments are taken care by Stripe.
SSL encrypts the query string. The only thing in the clear on the wire is the domain name (api.stripe.com). Although there may be other ways for GET query data to leak out (bookmarks, plugins...)
Okay, thanks for clearing that up for me.
Apparently the general idea is that because publishers and retailers compete less on price, the price for bestsellers can stay high, the income of which is supposed to be used by publishers to fund the publishing of less profitable books.

So, the goal of the fixed price is to ensure a variety and diversity of published books which do not all necessarily have to be profitable.

Personally I think the system is completely insane, and that we shouldn't treat books different from other cultural works (music, video games, movies, etc..).

EDIT: The Netherlands also has a fixed-price for books system, and that is what I was talking about above. Presumably the goal in France is similar, but I am not familiar with their implementation of this idea.
Personally I'm more bummed about a 1 collaborator limit on the $7/mo plan.
Thanks for the PSA.

While I understand why these things tend to be opt-out by default, I'm surprised there was no email from Verizon updating users about these new settings with a link to opt-out if they wanted to.

I used to think that the telecom industry is a lot more regulated than social network companies like Facebook, but I guess that's not really true!
$7 is not a problem, just 5 private repos is. One can quickly run out of those
Defense industry is too small and too regulated to create a meaningful market for startup companies. In addition, the needs of the military are often highly customized and niche.
This is one of the things I remember reading recently that got me really excited about 3D printing. Along with all the cool uses for consumers, it could be revolutionary for space travel. For instance, if a screw(/driver) was missing in space, they could in theory "just print one out."
Capitalism is a series of property and financial laws, not a set of values or a position about the role of government in society.
You have really made me think with this comment. I will have to come back later to address it properly.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough when I wrote it, but my intention was to show that, while I wrote that version of the post, I realized it was stupid (not just the post, but the idea).

We're working hard to not fall into any of the traps of working with friends. It's not easy. Who knows if we'll succeed. But we're trying.